thesandspurfandomcom-20200215-history
Web Guide
The website of The Sandspur is http://thesandspur.org . Anyone with a Rollins account can login to the website using their FoxLink username and password, however they can only edit the website if they are an Editor or Administrator. To login to thesandspur.org, hover over “About Us” in the top menu bar and select “Login.” Dashboard Once you are logged in to thesandspur.org, your dashboard will look something like the one pictured below. The boxes on the right may be in a different order or may look different. Your priority is that left column. That column lets you get everywhere you could possibly need to go. Add New Users Everyone automatically becomes a subscriber (and therefore a user) when they login to thesandspur.org. Most people who write and work for the paper have never logged in before. When creating articles, photo galleries, or video posts, the person posting the article needs to add the username of the author, whether that person has logged in before or not. To add a new user: #Hover over “Users.” #Click “Add New.” #Under “Add New User”: ##Username: author’s Rollins email address ##E-Mail: author’s Rollins email address ##First Name: author’s first name, as they want it to appear with the article ##Last Name: author’s last name ##Role: Contributor #Press “Add New User” Adding an Admin A person can be a subscriber or contributor to The Sandspur, but they cannot edit anything when they are logged into the website. In order to make changes, a person has to be changed to an admin or editor by someone who is already an admin. To make someone an admin:#Hover over “Users.” #Click “All Users.” #On the right, search the last name of the person whose status you want to change. #Hover over their name and click “edit.” #Under “Name” change their “Role” to “Editor.” Fix Email-as-Name User Issue WordPress has a few glitches, and one of them is that whenever someone logs into their WordPress account, their username (and name that displays on articles they have written) changes to their email instead of their name. This includes when you login with your own account. To change someone else’s username to their name: #Hover over “Users.” #Click “All Users.” #On the right, search the last name of the person whose status you want to change. #Hover over their name and click “edit.” #Under “Name” change “Display name publicly as” to their first and last name. To change your username quickly:#Hover over your name in the top right. #Push “Edit Profile.” #Under “Name” change “Display name publicly as” to your first and last name. Posting Content To see a step-by-step guide to uploading articles, photo galleries, and video posts, review the “Upload Content to Website” section of the Making a Paper chapter. Review Comments All comments must be reviewed before they are posted to the website because of the number of spam comments we receive. To approve/mark as spam comments, click on comments on the left toolbar. Hover over the comment and push “Approve” or “Spam” for all unapproved comments. A general rule of thumb about spam comments is to check the username first—if the name appears to be a hyperlink to a non-name (like NFL Jerseys or Chanel for Sale), then it is spam. Add or Edit a Page To add or edit a page, hover over “Pages” in the left toolbar. Push “All Pages” to edit current pages and push “Add New” to add a new page. Current pages include: About, Archives, Advertise, Campus Crime Map, Classifieds, Contact Us, Student Organization Index, Subscribe, and WPRK Schedule. If you are ever making a page that involves a table, the appropriate coding can be found under the “Student Organization Index” page. INSERT IFRAME, FORMS, AND MAPS iFrames allow you to insert additional features such as Google Maps and Google Forms. To insert an iFrame, add the text: dciframeEmbed URL, 575,430,0,yes,align:left/dciframe Change the “embed URL” to the URL the form or map has in their embed code. The “575” should be changed to the width and the “430” to the height of the iFrame. These can be added to posts as well as pages. Edit a Menu The Sandspur’s website has two menus—the black bar at the top and the menu at the bottom of the page. Both can be edited (meaning you can change the categories and pages that appear in them) by hovering over “Appearances” in the left sidebar and then selecting “Menus.” The “General Menu (Top Navigation)” is the top menu bar. The “Section Menu (Bottom Navigation)” is the bottom menu bar. You can add pages or categories to either menu by selecting the page/category you want to add from the Pages/Categories section on the left. Make sure to press “View All” to see all pages and categories. Push “Add to Menu” once you have selected the pages you want to add. They will appear at the bottom of the page. Drag them up to where you want them to appear. The top menu can have up to two levels of sub-menus. To delete a page or category from a menu, click on the page or category name and drag it out of the menu box. Edit Categories To create a new category for posts, hover over “Posts” in the left sidebar and click “Categories.” To add a category, put in the name of the category and the parent (Columns would be the parent for Sexperts) for the category and push “Add New Category.” To delete a category, hover over its name and select “delete.” Pushing delete only removes the category, not the posts inside of it. Change Home Page and Sidebar The home page is controlled by widgets. You can access these widgets by hovering over “Appearance” and selecting “Widgets.” In the right column, there are two widget boxes. The “Sidebar” box controls the sidebar of every page. The “Magazine” box controls the main section (below the slider) of the homepage. Only widgets labelled “Magazine” will fit well into the “Magazine” section. Push the down arrow beside the word “Sidebar” or “Magazine” to edit the widgets in that section. To add a widget to the sidebar or magazine, click on it from the “available widgets” box and drag it to the sidebar or magazine. To delete a widget from the sidebar or magazine, click on it and drag it out of the sidebar or magazine. To edit a widget, push the down arrow beside its name. Make sure to push “Save” at the bottom of the widget before you leave the page or the changes will not save. You can find more widgets by downloading plugins that have widget components. Add/Delete Plugins You can add new features to thesansdpur.org (pretty much anything you can imagine) by adding new plugins to the website. Note of caution: While, generally, poking around cannot break the website, downloading plugins that do not agree with our layout is one of the two ways to break the site and force you to call IT to fix it (the other is by messing with the coding). Most plugins are fine, but try to only download plugins with good reviews and that are up to date. To download a plugin, hover over “plugins” on the left sidebar and push “Add New.” You can use keywords to search for plugins. Once you have found one you like, click on it, download it, and activate it. The settings for the plugin should be available either as a new selection in the left sidebar or under the “Settings” option in the left sidebar. Add or Delete Ads To add or delete ads from the two rotating ad boxes on the side of the website, hover over “AdRotate” in the left sidebar. Go to “Manage Ads.” To add a new ad, push “Add New” at the top of the page. To delete an old ad, select the check box beside the ad and push “delete” or “deactivate.” Make sure to put active ads in either “Group 1” or “Group 2.” This will allow them to rotate through with the other ads in that group. Clear Page Cache Often after updating the website, particularly after adding content, the page will revert to an older version of the website. To fix this, after uploading a lot of content or making substantial changes, hover over “Performance” in the black toolbar and select “Empty All Caches.” Google Analytics The numbers on the Google Analytics board on your dashboard are not entirely accurate. To get accurate statistics, you need to login to the submit@thesandspur.org email address account and then go to Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics/). Push “Access Google Analytics” in the top right corner. Push “All Web Site Data.” The numbers you immediately see are “sessions” for the last month. To see page views, change the drop down box below “Overview” to “Page Views.” To change the amount of time you are looking at, change the date range in the top right. I broke it. Don’t freak out too badly—this happens occasionally. Typically this looks like a white screen where no one can login or make any changes. Sometimes the website itself is gone as well. Email Carrie Schulz in IT letting her know what you think caused the problem. She will fix it. She has access to the website because we are based on the Rollins server.